Put simply, OpenJCS (Open Job Control System) is an
attempt to bring to everyone the kind of scheduling power that could be found
only in schedulers costing tens of thousands of dollars per installation (if
it could be found at even that pricey altitude). OpenJCS will put you in
control of your batch load, not the other way around. It will let you
schedule what you want, where you want, when you want and how you want. You will
be able to organize your machines however you see fit, aggregating them into
groups that make sense to you. You will even be able to set up virtual hosts
made up of groups of machines so that you can distribute batch processing
among them. OpenJCS will support multiple calendars (and even custom
calendars) and will let you specify pre-processing for jobs. It will track
the execution history of your jobs, making it easier to see when you may need
to reconsider your batch processing needs. Some of the features that will be available
in OpenJCS include:

vPowerful Job Queuing System

vWide Variety of Dependencies Available

Calendar/Time
Dependencies

Job
Interdependencies and Constraints

Logical
Expression Dependencies

Manual
Intervention Dependencies

Resource
Dependencies

Runbook
Dependencies

File
Dependencies

vSharable Variables for Jobs

vAsk/Reply Facility for Runtime Value Prompting

vRule Sets For Powerful Schedule Customization

vVirtual Host Definition

vCustom Region Definition

vEasy Access to Information About a Job

vTransparent Relocation of Job Files as Needed

vCommand Line and Web Interfaces

vEasy Job Monitoring From Any Point in the
Domain

vIntegrates With Your Pre-Processors

vSchedule Recoverability and Redundancy

vEasy to Create and Manage Dependencies Between
Hosts

vCreate Your Own Job Verification Procedures

OK, now that you know a bit about what OpenJCS is, why
would we take on such a project? First off, we on the OpenJCS team are
convinced that there is a need for this kind of scheduling power. We’ve seen
bits and pieces of this kind of system in commercial schedulers, but never
all the functionality in a single package. And it seems that every commercial
scheduler we’ve seen either wants you to give up some functionality, or try
to shoehorn you into their view of what scheduling should be, whether it fits
your business or not. We’ve seen schedulers that make you move all your jobs
to one place, schedulers that take massive amounts of time to set up, and
schedulers that just won’t scale properly. For the prices that some outfits
charge, sometimes the real shock is how little you get for your money. We’re
trying to end that here. We’re trying to create a freely available scheduler
that gives you the power you need to manage your batch loads in a way that
makes sense to your business.